Polygon Launches Ethereum Scaling Solution zkEVM Beta on Mainnet

Polygon has released its much-awaited zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) beta – a technology expected to make the scalability of Ethereum faster, cheaper, and more secure – to the public Monday.

During the launch, the Ethereum-based layer-2 network said it was making all the aspects of the scalability solution open source for the developers, which according to founder Sandeep Nailwal, makes the Polygon aligned to the tenets of Web 3.

‘‘Today, Polygon Labs is proud to announce that Polygon zkEVM is launching on Mainnet Beta. Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta is permissionless and public – anyone can use it to transact and build. As of today, Polygon zkEVM is also completely open-source,’’ the team said in a press release.

First transaction on the zkEVM Mainnet Beta

Marking the launch, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin completed a symbolic first transaction on Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta, worth 0.005 ETH sent to a random address with the message ‘’A few million constraints for man, unconstrained scalability for mankind.’’ Buterin is a big supporter of zero-knowledge proof technology.

According to the announcement, dozens of decentralized applications (dApps) are already building on the scaling protocol, including gaming-based Lens and Balancer, and infrastructure providers, The Graph, Alchemy, ANKR, and Sequence.

Nailwal believes the technology is the future of Ethereum scalability, although he warned that it is still new and users should proceed cautiously. ‘‘It is a new technology, so we are going to put ample warnings for the users that please be cautious on this, don’t bring your life savings into it immediately,’’ he said in comments shared with Coindesk.

ZySync, another Ethereum scalability network, unveiled its Alpha mainnet last week after four years of testing the platform. Rollup technologies scale a blockchain by moving transactions off the mainnet to a second network layer. Transactions are then completed on the second network and compressed into a piece of data called a proof, which is then sent to the main network.